If you’re looking for personal banker interview questions and answers, look no further. We’ve compiled the absolute best personal banker interview questions and answers to help you with your upcoming interview in the finance industry.

What Is A Personal Banker

A personal banker is someone who works within a financial branch, helping customers that come through the doors with their financial needs. Personal bankers sometimes help with understanding a customers desire for a loan (mortgage, auto, other) or their needs with special accounts.

Let’s say you were to go into a bank and want to set up a money market account. The person you would sit down with would be a personal banker. Their role is to help you understand what that financial institution can offer you and ensure that your account gets set up appropriately and to your needs.

Personal Banker Interview Tips

It’s important that before you go into your interview as a personal banker that you understand a few things related to the institution you are applying to. If you have time before your interview, it’s vital that you spend time learning about the institutions financial products and how they work. Secondarily, if you have additional time to prepare, you should learn about the morals of the institution and what they are trying to provide their customers.

If you can, try to prepare yourself by knowing these area’s of discussion before your interview:

• What financial products they offer.
• What their customer goals are.
• What the financial institution stands behind (ethos, moral compass, etc.).

Knowing these area’s of interest will help you be proactive in the discussion that you’ll have when speaking with the hiring manager at that branch.

5 Personal Banker Interview Questions & Answers

1. How would you help a customer who had savings as part of their annual personal financial goal?

If a customer comes into the branch with the idea that they need help saving more money each year, we should go through a small amount of training with them to try and help them to reach their savings goal. The first thing we should help them understand is how to get savings. That means taking their monthly expenses from their monthly income, along with their variable spending budget and looking at what type of savings potential they actually have.

The customer should have a keen understanding of how to increase their savings each month by either increasing their income, reducing their expenses or playing with their variable spending budget.

Once we have gone through that we can start to look at savings vehicles for them, such as money market accounts or savings accounts. Then we should proceed to go through the terms of those accounts, such as a minimum balance that might be required. And then set them up with an account.

2. How would you help a customer understand what size of mortgage is best for them?

Similarly to looking at the customer's savings potential, we need to look at what type of expenses they already have. So that we can estimate what a monthly mortgage fee might be along with any residential taxes that they might incur. Once we do that, we can start to look at fixed-mortgage options that the bank provides and look at what type of setup might be best for them depending on their goals with their new home.

3. Why would you tell a customer to use a credit card for variable spending?

Credit cards can be a great way to place variable spending budgets or protection on. Variable spending, for the most part, used to be what caused fraud. Because let's say for instance you go to a gas station and leave behind a receipt, that is what used to cause fraud. While fraud has become more sophisticated, and we no longer need instances like that. We still should be looking at ways that credit cards can help someone to better plan their monthly expenditures. In general, using a small amount on a credit card each month and paying it off, will do wonders for the customer's credit score.

4. How would you walk a customer through all of our financial products?

Walking a customer through the financial products should be a quick process but also one that’s detailed. For example, we should be going through the various types of products the customer might be interested in, the tiers that exist for those products and then any fee’s or terms associated to those. The fee’s and terms are extremely important to cover. In fact, covering them twice might be the best thing to do. This is because we don’t want to set the customer up with a financial product they’re unhappy with, which they would come back to the branch and potentially file a complaint about at a later date.

5. How would you ensure that you are providing tailored customer service to each customer that comes through the branch?

It’s important to try and remember our customer's names and what their goals are if we can. If we can’t, then remembering to ask the customer what they need help with on that day and being extremely attentive to that, is the way we can ensure a great experience. The customer is coming into the branch because they need assistance, we need to remember that. That means they either feel frustration or need guidance. If we can empathize with that, we can continue to provide the best possible experience for the customer at the branch.